A Blessing for Bad Times

She was a very irritating lady. I'm relieved that lots of other people feel the same. Jews certainly don't like her, for though she came from a cultured Jewish family, she neither understood Judaism nor liked it.

She wobbled on the edge of Roman Catholicism for years, but she never fell into the font, so to speak, so that Christians have had to put up with her! I'm rather pleased she irritated everybody, irrespective of race, religion or creed.

Her life was short and her war-time death in London both tragic and embarrassing. She only allowed herself the rations of Occupied France, and so starved herself into death. Was her death a martyrdom, or was she plain crazy? Who knows?

She was none other than Simone Weil, a writer and mystic. For people like Mother Teresa, they represent absolute love, but Simone Weil represents absolute truth. Now truth isn't very comfortable. It doesn't warm us, like generosity, or make us glow, like saintliness. Some religious people play fast and loose with it, because it doesn't suit their well-being. 'The truth,' say the gospels, 'will make you free.' But who wants that? It doesn't make you feel at all cosy.

I first encountered Simone Weil when I was at university, back in the early sixties. But since those days my religion has turned me in different ways. How hard true religion is. How dark its truths. How much dying is implicit in eternal life!

Faith, however, is recognising God in bad times as well as in the good. If you can look into this darkness, and are fortunate enough to try and trust in it, then you'll turn to Simone Weil, like me.

In a book of prayers I once came across, there's a blessing on hearing bad news: 'Blessed are you. Lord, the judge of truth.' It's a pity Simone Weil was so prejudiced about the religion of her birth, for it's exactly what she taught.